A couple of years ago I decided to immerse myself in one colour at a time and see what would happen. It was the briefest flicker of an idea and for a short moment a shimmering vision.

First was to be red, than blue, then yellow—the three primary colours. I’d start with water and dye and take it from there. During the process red turned into pink and flowed into a warm pink tide. Blue in contrast was cool and stayed in the background, a very different companion. Stern father time, perhaps. I felt hemmed in by the colour and these self imposed limitations. I read somewhere that, ‘when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom’ and I persisted.

My workshop became a bower where I surrounded myself with blue things and in that space a slow and temperate love affair began. Blue became a metaphor for ‘duende’ (loosely means ‘having soul’) about which the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca said, ‘sadness and duende needs space to breathe, melancholy hates haste and floats in silence’.

In this gradual and slow moving process, my relationship to blue and what it evoked in me, changed. Now blue reminds me of the deep sea, where barely anything moves, where time is of little consequence.

In staying with such a restricted palette and letting this peculiar and subjective process unfold, I have harvested some patience, sadness and loss, sombre joy, vast space and ocean deep, a measure of freedom and some blue works to share.